


Boire pour la soif

by ozarkhowler



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: #justparisthings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-15
Updated: 2016-12-15
Packaged: 2018-09-08 18:28:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8856235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ozarkhowler/pseuds/ozarkhowler
Summary: Francis isn't doing anything special except existing. Several vignettes about living in Paris, as told by a Parisian.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a love letter to the city I've lived in for a long time now. 
> 
> These events are all based on or lifted verbatim from my own personal experiences as someone who lives here.

Francis has lived in the eighteenth for a _very_ long time. French people are often surprised to find this out; our own beautiful, untouched and high society Francis Bonnefoy used to live out in the faubourgs? Out where until very recently the smoke hung thickly in the air and the people coughed out their wages and slept on floors before working in the factories?

Yes, he replied. Yes, he did. He’d moved out into his tiny corner on the outskirts of Paris the minute they let him out of Versailles. He was dirty and sweating with the rest of them because that was his _job,_ damn you all, and he tired of people thinking he was above those who made sure he lived.

People have tried to get him to relocate to somewhere perhaps a little more proper. The fourth, they say, is cleaner nowadays. Or why not the ninth, if the nightlife of the Marais is too much for your ears to bear? Or (and this never comes from the older ones) maybe he could move to an apartment in the thirteenth?

But no, he maintains, he wants to stay in his apartment on Abbesses. It’s fine, even though rent has gone up. He’s _bobo_ but not to the extent of living in the thirteenth. He is stubborn enough that people stop fighting him about it.

At least it’s not Puteaux, the Parisians will reason. The idea of their own Gaul, haughty French nose and all, living out in the _banlieue_ is sometimes too much to bear for them.

Francis tells none of his superiors, however, that he goes out there all the time, if not just to buy cheaper cigarettes. Rent is much pricier now and he’s not made of money, you know.

~~

The woman who lives across from him nowadays is from Senegal. He’s pretty sure her husband is Tunisian; she and her husband were _so cute_ and Francis tried all he could to sneak glimpses just because living vicariously through the humans around him is practically in the job description.

He could have sworn the last time he saw Claudette she had been maybe four months pregnant. But the little boy trying to hide behind her knees looks to be nearly three years old. Had he really let time slip past him like that again?

“Say hello, Jean-Michel.”

“ _Salut, monsieur…”_ The little boy hesitated. “ _Euh…”_

Francis cannot help but smile. Jean-Michel’s hair is tight and curly just like his mother’s and he has the same grouping of beauty marks on his hand that his father does.

_“Moi, c’est Francis.”_

_“Salut, Francis._ ”

“He’s gotten so big,” Francis praises, looking Claudette in the eye. She smiles. He knows just by looking at her that she’s going to be moving out by the end of the year, probably out to Lyon or Angoulême in the hopes of finding more space for her children. Judging by how often her husband leaves the apartment, he’s probably working extra hours to afford a house.

Her husband calls something from within the apartment and she’s gone, Jean-Michel stowed on her hip. He sighs and goes back into his own apartment, jumping slightly when the door jolted open and he inevitably mistook an armchair for a person. Force of habit, he supposed.

~~

It’s cold when Francis wakes up and he wishes that he had more than heated floors; he pulls the duvet around his shoulders and falls back asleep, knowing that no one really cared if he came or went. Will they ever upgrade to a better heating system? He highly doubts it. 

It’s 9h22 when his throat started to itch for nicotine, his dog started to whine and when the jostling in the café below became more than just the setup for the breakfast rush.

“Fine, fine.”

 _Le Nazir_ is situated directly under his apartment; it is a sizeable café and Francis is known by those that frequent it, because of course he is, you can’t miss him if you tried. He descends the staircase with his spoiled, overweight, greying French bulldog under his arm and a hand-rolled cigarette clasped between his teeth. He puts his dog down and it waddles forward, wheezing in its unfettered manner. Someone calls a hello to him and Francis turns back and winks, gesturing to his dog and shrugging apologetically. Francis shakes his head and rolls his eyes at this ugly, ridiculous, hilarious little animal that he has devoted his life to for the past decade.

_“Câlins, t’es atroce. Je t’adore et j’sais pas pourquoi.”_

People are shuffling out of their cocoons to get bread and coffee and newspapers. The _Saint Remy Primeur_ is opening up across the street and trucks with fruit are coming in. Whether the fruit is fresh and unbruised remains a mystery, but Francis is not in the mood to concern himself with such things.

Francis lights his cigarette and Câlins accosts a pigeon.

It’s another day.

~~

The Parisian tradition is one of faint disdain at someone for doing something while doing the exact same thing.

This was incidentally not one of those situations.

He’s actually somewhat lost (leave him alone, he can’t know everything at once) around the Gare du Nord when the American walks up to him and asks him something in English:

“Do you know where the Eiffel Tower is?”

Francis gives this man a quick once-over and realizes that he’s wearing a shirt that genuinely, actually says “I LOVE GEORGE W. BUSH” in giant black letters.

“Do you have a map?”

The man pulls it out. He points to the blue RER line. He deliberately makes his accent as thick as possible.

“Go back to the _gare_ and take this train for 30 minutes. You should arrive.”

“Thank you.”

The American went off on his merry way, running directly into a flock of pigeons and nearly bowling over a trashcan.

The Blue for 30 minutes will take you to the airport, Mitry-Claye or to Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse, depending on which direction you take it. It will not take you anywhere near Trocadéro or Bir-Hakeim, which is where you need to go if you want to see the Tower.

Francis steps off of the sidewalk as he’s laughing to himself, his foot landing directly into the stream of water rushing through the gutters.

“ _Pute.”_

~~

Francis books it directly into the metro because he saw that he’d accidentally dropped his smoldering cigarette butt on a pigeon with one leg and was too overcome with emotion to stay around and see what became of the bird. _What kind of day is this going to be?_

The rosettes of people clustered around maps and ticket booths always make his heart swell even though it means that _dammit,_ the trains will probably be full and he won’t get to sit down this time around and he’s going all the way to Vavin and his knees aren’t getting any less sore these days, and also who let him get this old anyway?

Every city’s public transport has its own distinct smell. Strasbourg tramways smell strangely like apples and hot air. A bus in Montpellier always smells a little like soap. Francis is too accustomed to the Paris metro smell to really know what it is; when Alfred visited him, Alfred said it was “week old cold cut ham in a Yellowstone national park bathroom”. Francis called him rude.

He makes it three stops before someone gets on and begins playing the accordion. _It’s going to be that kind of day._

If Francis makes no eye contact with him, he will leave him alone. There is, as always, the constant war within him between being human and doing his job.

When the man stops his godawful playing and walks by with the paper cup, Francis-as-France falls away and Francis Bonnefoy, a man who has gone to bed hungry and cold and doesn’t wish that on anyone, let alone one of his citizens, gives him the two-euro coin he was saving for coffee.

~~

It’s the Fête de la Musique and Francis is in the center of the plaza in front of the Pompidou. Did you know you could breathe sounds?

He did. He would forget but he would be reminded every year on this day; he breathes in the guitar and exhales the vocals. This time the drums. Now he exhales and it’s the one person who has brought a didgeridoo (there is one every year)

He sees a flock of teenagers taking turns climbing onto each other’s backs. They’ve finished the _bac_ a month ago. They don’t have classes for another two months and Francis wishes for a minute that he’d have had two months like that, having completed something and knowing it was finished. There is the second part, the fear of the unknown second half of your life, but he somehow craves the idea of having the knowledge that a segment of your life is over, and that it was time to start anew.

He sees someone who’s had too much to drink. He’s throwing up into one of the anchored trash bins on the sidewalk. The overwhelming, sickly smell of Manzanita hits Francis’s nostrils and they involuntarily crinkle. The night sky has that desperate purple color that you only get with a certain kind of light pollution. Francis inhales and exhales more music. A woman nearby is feeding a flock of pigeons before a bass line scares them away, sending them flying into the noise to begin with.

He lights another cigarette.

_Hang in there._

~~

Boulangères are their own type of person, and the heavy-armed ladies who work at the bakery near his apartment are no exception.

They know by now, of course, that Francis has memorized the schedule for when the bread comes out of the oven en masse. They know he shows up just a little bit after that happens so that he gets bread while they’re restocking. On Sundays, he has timed exactly when the crowd shows up asking for their Sunday cakes and treats and he arrives maybe five minutes beforehand just to avoid the crowd. Some would call him sneaky. Most know better than to say anything, because they know this sort of observation only comes with age, and none want to be the person to call Francis Bonnefoy “old”.

There is, however, always one small hitch in his plotting

You could be the Lord and Savior incarnate; that bread you want is not actually yours until they put it in your cold, sad, and begging hands.

He hitches Câlins’s leash up just outside and walks in. If he had a tail, it would have been wagging.

“Francis, there are still ten minutes. There is nothing yet.”

He looks at his watch. _Damn,_ they’re right. He’d been walking faster as Paris got darker earlier.

“Are you sure?” he asks, just to safe face. The forty-three year old woman tilts an eyebrow and Francis, over two thousand years old, feels summarily scolded.

“Yes.”

“I will be back in ten, then.”

~~

It’s getting colder outside and as of the first of December he’s on his holiday diet of vin chaud and nicotine.

There is always something strange for him about walking by old buildings. There is something even stranger for him about walking down newer streets.

He can’t walk down a Haussmann boulevard without thinking about what all was there before.

He knows he can’t divorce himself from collective memory, but when he realizes that he can’t remember all the old streets that there used to be he panics slightly.

He’s taking his dog for a walk, having decided to take this waddling, obese, _darling idiot_ of his all the way out to the Tuileries instead of Monceau like usual, because everyone deserves a change of scenery every now and then, no?

He also knows that the antique ceramic shop on the way is selling its old plates for two euro apiece and he figures he might as well kill two birds with one stone.

“Thief!”

He turns to see a man with shopping bags that are _definitely_ not his barreling towards him.

Many years of muscle memory fail him and all he does is stick his leg out for him to trip over, sending the man flying.

The security guards grab him and Francis, as always, is unsure as to whether it’s his job to stay or go.

His dog is whining.

He elects to go.

~~

A man leans forward and hisses something at her. She pretends that she didn’t hear, but then he repeats himself.

“French people don’t wear that _thing_.”

She immediately reaches up to keep her hijab close to her head in case he tries to grab for it. His eyes are boiling.

“I’m French, sir.”

His eyes seem to somehow heat up further and she feels like the metro got three degrees warmer just by virtue of the rage pulsing from his temples. This happens to her maybe once a week, but each time she wonders if she’ll say something and have it be the last.

“It’s illegal.”

“No, it’s not,” pierces a voice from across the metro car. The man immediately turns to look. She doesn’t dare.

“The laws you’re talking about are those that forbid ostentatious religious symbols in government buildings, such as the city halls and public schools. She can wear what she pleases in public spaces such as these. You too…” he continues, looking down at the ill-fitting suit he’s donning, “…unfortunately.”

The man shuts his mouth and gets off after three stops. She turns to look for the man who’d helped her and meets a pair of blue eyes. She feels like she knows him but she doesn’t know from where.

“ _Merci,_ ” she mouthed.

“ _De rien,_ ” he mouthed back, casually looking back down at his phone.

~~

“Roses?”

“Yes.”

“That will be 35.”

He will always pay the price but he’s always confused as to how we, as a society, have decided that certain plants cost more than others.

He takes the long way and he passes by the university. It’s around 13h; the students are pouring out of the gates and he can tell which ones took their exams and which ones are about to by the intensity of the glassy, dead look in their eyes.

One mistakes him for a classmate and swats his shoulder.

“Do you have a light?”

Francis handed the freshly nineteen year old his lighter and the kid lit her smoke, seemingly not realizing just who she’d decided to pester.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

She gives it back and meets his eyes and every irreverent, self-deprecating thing she was about to say about being a mess falls from her consciousness.

“I…excuse me.”

Francis shrugs before hefting his flowers.

“There’s nothing to be excused from. Go study.”

“Yes, sir.”

That’s the only incident as he makes his way to Montparnasse cemetery. He knows where the grave is by virtue of having been there when it was installed. He puts six roses on Albert’s grave.

“If you could only see how much stranger our world has gotten, sir.”

He notices that one person has figured out who he is: a person, maybe seventeen, with dark pretty eyes and a full mouth pressed into a confused twist. Judging from their clothes, they’ve slipped out from a procession. A distant uncle or aunt, Francis decides; if it were someone they knew, they would not have slipped away.

“Do you want to see something strange?” he asks. When they don’t answer he keeps walking, six remaining roses clutched in his hand like an arrest warrant. They follow in spite of themselves and see him put the last six roses on a grave, cleaner than some of the others in the cemetery and possessing maybe one of the bigger headstones.

By the time they reach the headstone, he’s gone.

They read the front:

 

**FRANCIS LUC-ÉTIENNE BONNEFOY. 1794.**

_Que ta bonté nous soit propice._

They squinted. How could that be possible? Hadn't Montparnasse only been created some 30 years after that? 

Well, they reasoned…it’s probably easy to move a tomb if there’s nothing in it.

They looked down to see countless roses: fresh, dried, or wilting.

Somewhere, Francis adjusted the scarf around his neck to hide a scar.

~~

Francis likes to make a show of himself when he’s at events; at Paris Pride he is the first person to jump on a float and dance or try to climb the pillar at the Bastille when the people finally pour out from the procession like cake batter into a pan. During the _fête nationale_ in July he’s larger than life and spills over; he drinks and sits on the butte watching fireworks when it’s dark enough.

In the day to day, though, it is sometimes hard for him to stand out too much. Sometimes it frightens him, the idea that someone could see him tired, sloped, buying a bottle of wine, bread, and matches. Small. Human-sized.

When he tries to cross the street quickly and a car cuts him off he jumps back; someone blows air through their lips in a sign of camaraderie and he grins sheepishly. A pair of eyes is locked on the back of his head. He always thought it was funny that foreigners seemed to recognize him easier than his locals, who don’t see his age anymore and only see what they grew up with.

The foreign _children_ seem to think it the most obvious thing in the whole world, which delights him.

He was on the train to Antony to get to Orly Sud to pick up someone-who-will-not-be named when he saw another pair of big, hazel eyes locked firmly onto his face. She had her pretty curls tied up in little buns, her mother absentmindedly bouncing her on her knee.

Her head tilted a little and she squinted at him. Francis winked and put a finger to his lips before getting up to get off at his stop.

_How I love you all._

 


End file.
